September 28, 2011

Remember the days when floppy drives were all the rage. Well I don’t miss those slow noisy things, it’s hard to believe that a large floppy was one that held 1.44MB of data. You would need 10 of them to store a modern picture these days! Thankfully there is still a use for these relics, you can connect them to a custom microcontroller and have it play some music using the stepper motors that move the read/write heads. 🙂 You can see a bit more information on the Dual Floppy Drive Music here. There is an English translation in the works, when it is done that link will also be added.

“FDD has a simple interface – the description may be found for example [ HERE ]. To move the head you need to activate the drive by pulling the DRVSB0 or 1 (depends on the cable you have and the connector – notice the crossover on the FDD ribbon cable) pin low and then falling edge on STEP pin makes the head move one step in direction dependent on DIR pin state.
An ATMega microcontroller is generating those frequencies and it makes the drives play music.”